Days without number. The ticking, sometimes, of a clock to pass the time. But not always. The sounds of this moment were running water and an occasional shout. The shower, the faucet, turned on as far as they could go to drown not her, but everything else; ‘everything else’ being her mother, Pink, and the man in the other room, though some of the noise broke through and Luna knew that when her mother opened the door again, whenever that happened, the man would be long gone. The smell of alcohol and cigarette smoke would linger, the last signs of his existence.

She never saw them, the men. Didn’t know who they were or what they looked like. All she knew was that tomorrow night she and Pink would leave this motel for another one like it. As there were bugs hiding behind the toilet here, so too would they hide in the next bathroom. The tiles would be as grimy, the sink cracked like all those before it, along with a light blinking in the ceiling, housed in an insect cemetery, dimmed with the dust of ages. Luna knew the ghosts of them all. Oh, she’d never seen one, transparent and glowing or hidden beneath a sheet pretending to be a person playing a prank, but she knew they were there, hiding out of sight.

They didn’t bother with her, a child was of no use to the deceitful dead, but they did possess Pink. She’d seen it happen. One minute sitting silently, staring at threadbare carpet or the dingy wall, the next rocking violently back and forth, tearing at just as dingy yellow hair.

A mother named Pink, like the color. Everybody who called her anything called her Pink, though Luna hadn’t heard anyone say her mother’s name in a long time, or her own for that matter. She didn’t see things that were the real color often, either. Her mother had a bra that was her name. It was lace and made in China. Luna thought she was probably made in China, too. Certainly, she didn’t seem to come from the world of Pink and she was glad about that because Pink’s world was perpetually in trouble. It was a place where someone was bound to be angry. Most often Pink.

At least, Luna thought as she held a small, pale hand beneath the broken, spluttering stream from the metal shower head, Pink wasn’t often mad at her. No, Pink’s biggest enemy seemed to be herself. The one she fought, the one she hurt and hated was the person she saw in the mirror. It was why the mirrors were shattered by the time they left for another roadside vacancy with a deserted parking lot. Old signs barely hanging on by the side of the road, with winking red lights to let passersby know there were a plethora of rooms available.

Luna didn’t know exactly how long she’d been in the bathroom when Pink opened the door, but the sun was nowhere to be found out the window. The digital clock shuttered midnight, or noon, and Pink had her cell phone in hand.

“I’m going to the gas station,” she said, as she picked Luna up and set her on the made-up sofa. “Go to sleep or something.”

Pink would be gone for the rest of the night and Luna wasn’t tired yet. The door closed, the lock turned with the key that Pink took with her, and Luna turned on the television. When Pink returned in the morning, she would bring food for the day. She would change Luna’s shirt and make her brush her teeth. Then they would leave.

Every day was the same. Pink spent as little time as possible in the room while Luna went nowhere else. For all the hours they spent on the road, Luna felt like she’d seen nothing of the world.

Rarely, very rarely, on long stretches of highway, they would pull off to visit a rest stop and, even more rarely, there was a playground; Pink would sit alone under some tree and Luna would slide on the slides and swing on the swings. And thinking of swings, Luna remembered Pink pushing her as she sat encased in blue and yellow plastic; at some point, she learned to pump her legs by watching another child, but she couldn’t recall any specifics about it. Like most of her life, it was all a blur, a blending of minutes. Each day ran together so that Luna wasn’t even sure where she was on the timeline of her life. She wasn’t so young that she needed help with every little thing, but she wasn’t so big that she could do a whole lot either. She was pretty sure the rating of this movie, The Shining, was above her pay grade, but she’d watched things like it before with no consequence, so she didn’t see what the point of the little letters and numbers was. If no one was going to stop her, then couldn’t she do what she wanted? 

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As it stood, the single thing Luna actively wanted was to watch television. It was the source of all her information. The occasionally automatic closed captions taught her to read and she knew the forecast for the upcoming week more often than not. The television was also the device that taught her Pink was a prostitute. She saw other women like her mother on crime shows late at night, but she didn’t enjoy stories about real life very much and would opt for a good ole paranormal thriller if it was available. She did wonder, of course, if these movies presented as fiction might be closer to reality than they said they were. How else did people think of things like madmen becoming one with portrait hell?

Something else Luna learned by watching the people in the box was that, like her, many humans preferred seeing things that weren’t real. Things they told themselves weren’t real. They played a role on a stage even in the reality they called life, the audience whoever happened to be around at the moment. She’d seen it herself, it happened right before her very eyes, more than once when Pink took the card or key to a new room. Someone behind the desk pretended Pink was a normal mother taking her normal daughter on a road trip when the truth was all too obvious. Pink didn’t try to hide it. She wore short, skin-tight velvet dresses or pleather skirts. She had two pairs of strappy, chunky high heels. She paid with cash.

Luna supposed Pink could have been pretty if she didn’t look half-dead. Maybe she was pretty once. Her blue eyes were too dull now and Luna had never seen her look any other way. Not when they went to the dollar store, not when she lost a tooth, not now when there was a surplus of money hidden beneath her car seat.

When Jack Torrance died frozen in the winter night, Luna thought he deserved it. He was a garbage human being if she ever saw one. He didn’t even do the job he was hired to do and though she understood that the building and its dead were somewhat responsible for his asshole personality, she didn’t buy it as a good enough excuse. He deserved to be locked there with the rest of them, tormented until the hotel burned down and then even after that. Pink wasn’t perfect, but she wasn’t bad either. Not as bad as that. Not even close. And what was bad? Was Jack even bad? Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was right all along. Maybe killing Danny and his wife would have saved them from something worse, not that he intended to, but if it did… Was it still bad for them to die?

It wasn’t that Luna thought of death and dying all the time, but she saw it often enough on television that she did consider it. There was no hiding from it and even people you wouldn’t think deserved it died, so was it such a bad thing if it happened unexpectedly?

She supposed some deaths couldn’t be described as ‘good’, no matter how objective you tried to be, but then again you never did know how a person was going to turn out. What if they would become an even bigger killer than the person who killed them? What if the murderer was a time traveler, sent back to change a horrific future of lawlessness and corpses? No one would believe them if they said it. They’d be declared insane. That might even be part of the deal. They would go back in time and act like they were some ruthless killer, knowing that no one would even remember why they’d done it. Maybe they wouldn’t either. Since, if the whole future was rewritten, then would they have traveled through time at all?

She fell asleep as those thoughts became fuzzy, drifting into dreams of warped colors, and woke to a breakfast sandwich of egg, cheese, and bacon between two halves of a croissant, and another day on the road. The tank was full and Pink didn’t stop for several hours. She hated to stay in one place for too long; that didn’t mean they’d never returned to a once visited motel, they’d done it a few times, but Luna thought Pink must be on the run. So, when the car pulled into yet another lot, Luna realized that it wasn’t quite like those of the motels they’d stayed in. This building was tall and brick, the parking spaces full of cars as old as Pink’s, and the woman who brought them inside was dressed like Pink, too.

They were shown to a room not much larger than those of the motels, though here the floor was hardwood and bare of any rug. It also had a small kitchen with a big refrigerator. Another difference, Luna noted with alarm, was the absence of a television. Where was the television? Every room had a television, she thought it was the law.

And then Pink said they were staying here and Luna did something she’d never done before:

She threw a fit.

She screamed and cried and someone banged on the wall but she didn’t care, and Pink slapped her.

The shock of it hit them both harder than Pink hit Luna; she, the adult, was the one who fled the room, leaving the child to touch her cheek in a daze. For all the things Pink didn’t do, like take her to a doctor or a dentist, bringing her to a place without television was one of them and so was hitting. Luna had never been hit in her life. Not by Pink, not by anybody.

This was because there wasn’t a television, she just knew it.